Archive for Feb 28, 2011

Apple's long-rumored iTunes cloud plans may not in fact result in a subscription-based streaming music service, with the company tipped to be looking to simply offer online storage to its users. According to the FT, music industry sources have quietly confirmed that Apple's intent is to allow iTunes users to remotely host their paid tracks, and then stream that content to various devices.

AMD's beastly Radeon HD 6990 video card has officially broken cover, with the company seeding shots of the dual-GPU monster ahead of its expected launch in early Q2 2011. Hexus was handed a trio of official pics of the HD 6990, and while exact specifications are still unknown, we can deduce a little from the shots.

With Apple's iPad 2 event this coming Wednesday, the rumor machine is building up to its usual hype crescendo. Freshly skimmed from the tittle-tattle-tubes this morning are some leaked images, one claiming to be of a white iPad 2 screen digitizer, and another demanding to be taken seriously as an official iPad 2 render.

We have talked a lot about Ford's Sync system around here. The Sync system allows the drive to use their smartphone hands free and allows the control of many functions of the vehicle audio and HVAC systems using voice commands. Ford has announced that Sync now speaks more languages.

If you are looking for a new tablet computer CeBIT 2011 is right around the corner and you can bet there will be many tablets that debut at the show. One of the tablets that we know will be seen at the show is from a company called TazTag and is dubbed the TazPad.

I mentioned about a month ago now that Huawei had filed a suit against former partner Motorola to keep the company from transferring Huawei IP over to Nokia Siemens. Nokia Siemens is attempting to purchase Motorola's wireless network business where Huawei and Motorola have cooperated for over a decade.

If you are the busy filed worker sort that needs to be able to work wherever you might be power is probably your biggest issue. Your computer and other gear need power to operate and many devices last only a few hours on a charge before you need to plug in.

If you were around in the early days of the video game, you will remember classics like Asteroids and others with blocky graphics and the iconic pewpew sound of lasers being fired. There are still a lot of video games that are made for fans of that old school style fare and a new one has turned up with the name PewPewPewPewPewPewPewPewPew.

I like robots as much as the next geek, but some of them creep me out a bit. I blame it on Hector and Terminator scaring me as a kid. DARPA has some out there projects that often turn into some interesting finished items that may one day see the battlefield.

The Kinect has turned out to be something that in my house at least rarely gets used. It is a very cool device though and I continue to be amazed at some of the things that geeks are able to hack the Kinect to do. One of the latest hacks turns the Kinect into a crude 3D scanner that can turn the pose the person stands with in front of the camera into a foam bust.

Apple's AirDrop easy file-sharing feature in Mac OS X Lion may bring the company some headaches, with a French tablet and software firm claiming it borrows from a wireless sharing system of its own. eviGroup founder Nicolas Ruiz claims that AirDrop's functionality shows considerable overlap with his own INPI-filed "Technique de Communication Réseau sans Configuration" ("technique of network communication without configuration").